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Context and goal

The goal of this ticket is to explain how to create an extension for the Burp Suite Professional taking as implementation example the “Reverse Tabnabbing” attack.

“Reverse Tabnabbing” is an attack where an (evil) page linked from the (victim) target page is able to rewrite that page, such as by replacing it with a phishing site. The cause of this attack is the capacity of a new opened page to act on parent page’s content or location.

The attack vectors are the HTML links and JavaScript window.open function so to mitigate the vulnerability you have to add the attribute value: rel="noopener noreferrer" to all the HTML links and for JavaScriptadd add the values noopener,noreferrer in the windowFeatures parameter of the window.openfunction. For more details about the mitigation please check the OWASP HTML Security Check.

Basic steps for (any Burp) extension writing

The first step is to add to create an empty (Java) project and add into your classpath the Burp Extensibility API (the javadoc of the API can be found here). If you are using Maven then the easiest way is to add this dependency into your pom.xml file:

Extend the (Burp) scanner capabilities

In order to find the Tabnabbing vulnerability we must scan/parse the HTML responses (coming from the server), so the extension must extend the Burp scanner capabilities.

The interface that must be extended is IScannerCheck interface. The BurpExtender class (from the previous paragraph) must register the custom scanner, so the BurpExtender code will look something like this (where ScannerCheck is the class that extends the IScannerCheck interface):

Let’s look closer to the methods offered by the IScannerCheck interface:

consolidateDuplicateIssues – this method is called by Burp engine to decide whether the issues found for the same url are duplicates.

doActiveScan – this method is called by the scanner for each insertion point scanned. In the context of Tabnabbing extension this method will not be implemented.

doPassiveScan – this method is invoked for each request/response pair that is scanned. The extension will implement this method to find the Tabnabbing vulnerability. The complete signature of the method is the following one: List<IScanIssue> doPassiveScan(IHttpRequestResponse baseRequestResponse). The method receives as parameter an IHttpRequestResponse instance which contains all the information about the HTTP request and HTTP response. In the context of the Tabnabbing extension we will need to check the HTTP response.

Parse the HTTP response and check for Tabnabbing vulnerability

As seen in the previous chapter the Burp runtime gives access to the HTTP requests and responses. In our case we will need to access the HTTP response using the method IHttpRequestResponse#getResponse. This method returns a byte array (byte[]) representing the HTTP response as HTML.

In order to find the Tabnabbing vulnerability we must parse the HTML represented by the HTML response. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the API offered by Burp for parsing HTML.

The most efficient solution that I found to parse HTML was to create few classes and interfaces that are implementing the observer pattern (see the next class diagram ):

The most important elements are :

IByteReader interface – this interface represents the Subject (or Observable) from the Observer pattern. This interface has methods for attach and notify the observers.

(My) Conclusion

This books makes a great job explaining how the “bricks” of the Internet (HTTP, HTML, WWW, Cookies, Script Languages) are working (or not) from the security point of view. Also a very systematic coverage of the browser (in)security is done even if some of the information it starts to be outdated. The book audience is for web developers that are interested in inner workings of the browsers in order to write more secure code.

Chapter 1 Security in the world of web applications

This goal of this chapter is to set the scene for the rest of book. The main ideas are around the fact that security is non-algorithmic problem and the best ways to tackle security problems are very empirical (learning from mistakes, develop tools to detect and correct problems, and plan to have everything compromised).

Another part of the chapter is dedicated to the history of the web because for the author is very important to understand the history behind the well known “bricks” of the Internet (HTTP, HTML, WWW) in order to understand why they are completely broken from the security point of view. For a long time the Internet standards evolutions were dominated by vendors or stakeholders who did not care much about the long-term prospects of technology; see the Wikipedia Browser Wars page for a few examples.

Part I Anatomy of the web (Chapters 2 to 8)

The first part of the book is about the buildings blocks of the web: the HTTP protocol, the HTML language, the CSS, the scripting languages (JavaScript, VBScript) and the external browser plug-ins (Flash, SilverLight). For each of these building blocks, the author presents how are implemented and how are working (or not) in different browsers, what are the standards that supposed to drive the development and how these standards are very often incomplete or oblivious of security requirements.

In this part of the book the author speaks only briefly about the security features, knowing that the second part if the book supposed to be focused on security.

Part II Browser security features (Chapter 9 to 15)

The first security feature presented is the SOP (Same Policy Origin), which is also the most important mechanism to protect against hostile applications. The SOP behaviour is presented for the DOM documents, for XMLHttpRequest, for WebStorage and how the security policies for cookies could also impact the SOP.

A less known topic that is treated is the SOP inheritance; how the SOP is applied to pseudo-urls like about:, javascript: and data:. The conclusion is that each browser are treating the SOP inheritance on different ways (which can be incompatible) and it is preferable to create new frames or windows by pointing them to a server-suplied blank page with a definite origin.

Another less known browser features (that can affect the security) are deeply explained; the way the browsers are recognizing the content of the response (a.k.a content sniffing), the navigation to sensitive URI schemes like “javascript:”, “vbscript:”, “file:”, “about:”,“res:” and the way the browsers are protecting itself against rogue scripts (in the case of the rogue scripts protection the author is pointing the inefficiently of the protections).

The last part is about different mechanisms that browsers are using in order to give special privileges to some specific web sites; the explained mechanisms are the form-based password managers, the hard-coded domain names and the Internet Explorer Zone model.

Part III Glimpse of things to come (Chapter 16 to 17)

This part is about the developments done by the industry to enhance the security of the browsers,

For the author there are two ways that the browser security could evolve; extend the existing frameworks/s or try to restrict the existing framework/s by creating new boundaries on the top of existing browser security model.

For the second alternative the following solutions are presented: W3C (former Mozilla) Content Security Policy , (WebKit) Sandboxed frames and Strict Transport Security.

The last part is about how the new planned APIs and features could have impact on the browser and applications security. Very briefly are explained the “Binary HTTP”, WebSocket (which was not yet a standard when the book was written), JavaScript offline applications, P2P networking.

Chapter 18 Common web vulnerabilities

The last chapter is a nomenclature of different known vulnerabilities grouped by the place where it can happen (server side, client side). For each item a brief definition is done and links are provided towards previous chapters where the item has been discussed.